The bed is bare. A redtorn blanket below a bulb of maybe thirty watts if I can count right, sputtering high on the ceiling, winking at my wrinkled underwear dripping slowly onto the edgeof the sink. I dress and go out.

The morning, a sun in her ragged sock, I walk to my tough philosophy class on Auguste Compte. I say nothing but enjoy the fierce flashing debates between studentsand the good prof Monsieur La Porte.One day I arrive. The professor

had fallen dead. Scrawled on a piece of bleak paper gleefully tacked to the door,a notice: La Porte est fermée.A Spanish friend sees me let down and gives me a rare bookof the surrealist Aleixandre,Swords like lips, which one day

will guide me to a Madrid parlor.We chat about Hernández, his light, his death in prisonReturning home I scurry along the somber rue de Prince, a little hotel where the princeVerlaine one good evening lay down, sloshed and dead on the floor.

I don’t love Paris

I don’t love Paris. Maybeit’s the blue rain and I smell saltwhen the sewers sing their criesof the troglodyte. I love Paris.

It’s the sun of three bluetswho whisper that my papersare fake and I live in a roomon Cherche-Midi. The concierge

each night holds a black caton his shoulder. No kidding.He laughs tersely and I am scared.Nonetheless a blue first of June

in the Place of Saint Sulpice,the sixteenth arrondissement, I marry in the city hallbut I lose my key. No room,

we sleep at her place. Who isthis boy with whom you’ve spentthe night? speaks the lady.He’s my husband. She throws us

into the street. I don’t like Paris. I love her tenderly, the artists starving,the dirty rain, the sun blue.

Time left behind her winter coatfor Mort and Jeanetteon the moon of the Seine

Time left behind her winter coatand we are eating on a boat.When I was poor at the SorbonneI strolled a Paris bullet-gray. My cheerful pal Apollinairewas a trench song of filthy rain.

Time has torn up her winter coatand we are schmoozing on a boat.

Grubbing at the School of Mines,I hopped down a thousand stairsto slop up bowls of blackish grimethat only a hobo could bear, but being broke I liked it a lotand walked into beautiful sun

in the white lightning of a mouse.Time has nibbled her winter coat.

Nights I was snoring in my bedwith sheets too short, and when it rained the hotel courtyard stank of piss.Time whimpers by but I hang on.Now I’m a nut and not yet dead.My hair is white in mourning for

my youth, a fat time now remote, but we are making love on a boat.

Below the bridge of Mirabeauslumbers a Seine of vanished love,and I am sleeping in a sweet hotelwhere once I never would dare go.So please forget my lunar errors.I like to gossip with the flowers.

Time has burned up her winter coatand we are drinking on a boat.

Paris, August 15, 2000

The beautiful night

The night of silence splitting my ears in an apartment (a bitlousy) that I like enough. Upstairsthe roaring step of a cat.Got to sleep but no such luck.I perceived you, I transform youfrom an old Japanese verse.A girl of the street appears.End of story. Then happy I go outinto the winter. There are some coldsto cross. The snow is beautifuland I forget that night is ending.